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Four Flusher

It’s for sale. So buy it, and nobody gets hurt.

Dear Word Detective: I was told that the phrase “floor flusher” was associated with late 19th century department stores employees sent out on to the “floor” to help “flush out” potential customers. True? Or charming but false? — Carolyn.

Are those my only choices? How about “very strange and really, really wrong in several different ways”? But thanks for the great question, and I’m not being sarcastic. Were it not for folks sending me the strange word origin stories they’ve heard, writing this column wouldn’t be half as much fun. Right now, for instance, I’m picturing a large man, a sort of “reverse bouncer” bearing a carnation in his lapel and a cattle prod in his paw, approaching a herd of apprehensive Macy’s shoppers with a cheery “Can I help youse?”

Onward. If you plug “floor flusher” into Google, you get more than 57,000 ghits (short for “Google hits”), so it may come as a surprise when I say that “floor flusher” is not actually the phrase you’re looking for. The slang term is “four flusher,” meaning “a bluffer, a cheat, a worthless, dishonest person.” Those Google hits are almost all for a 1954 Popeye cartoon entitled “Floor Flusher” (available on YouTube.com) in which Bluto and Popeye wrestle for the right to fix Olive Oyl’s plumbing problems. At one point (yes, I watched it), after Bluto has completely flooded her house, Olive shouts, “Don’t touch me, you floor flusher!” The cartoon’s title is thus a pun on “four flusher.” The pun works because, by 1954, “four flusher” had been popular American slang for at least fifty years.

The actual origin of “four flusher” was the game of poker, where a “flush” is a high hand composed of five cards of the same suit. (The roots of “flush” in this poker sense are obscure, but may refer to the hand “washing away” the other players.) A “flush” of only four cards, however, is worthless, and to “four-flush” — to bluff other players with such a hand — became a metaphor for feigning knowledge, accomplishment or courage (“‘I thought he was going to fight.’ ‘Not that boy. He was four-flushin’.” George Ade, “Artie,” 1896).

Having just watched the silent “The Show Off” (1926) with Louise Brooks, in one of the title cards, Lulu called the character Aubrey a ‘Floor Flusher’. Maybe that was a typo? This movie is second-billed on a DVD with Clara Bow’s “The Plastic Age”, which is funny, because a character in that movie calls someone else a ‘four flusher’!

My boyfriend told me that it was fore flusher; meaning a man who flushes the urinal before he finishes peeing in it. A Fore Flusher is therefore a man who is lazy (flushing before he’s finished just to hurry up and get the flushing motion over and done with….leaving smelly pee in the urinal for someone else to clean up.) Then I just heard Clark Gabel ask his wife if she thought he was what sounded like a fore flusher, but now that I googled that, I found out he must have been speaking of Four Flusher as in your description. Anybody else ever here of the Fore Flusher term?

Thank you for your answer to my question; defining the term four flusher. After reading the replies however, I feel like the guy who asked a stranger for the correct time and said stranger told him how to make a watch. Keep the faith.

I heard this term from the NBC Sunday Night Movie — I think it was in the early 1990’s — LBJ The Early Years. Lyndon Johnson’s first job in Washington D.C. was as an assistant to Congressman Clayburg. His nasty wife called Lyndon Johnson a four flusher the day she fired him. A woman firing a man? Where was this — on Mars?

I was watching a movie with Clark Gable in it called “Homecoming” made in 1948. Someone called Gable’s character a ‘Four Flusher’. This caused his character to react strongly. Curious, I went on Dictionary.com, and put in ‘floor flusher’ and found out it was actually ‘Four Flusher’. Thanks for educating me in the meaning of the term.

Sean Penn calls an unknown guy a “four-flusher” in the movie Sweet & Lowdown. Emmet Ray(Penn) says he burned a $100 bill to trump the FF’s $20.’I could cut that kinda stuff out’ he says. The phrase was common enough in the 30’s & used appropriately. Empty boaster. I always knew the phrase from movies & books. I understood the supposition was insultingly negative. After briefly researching I now know why.

I always heard this line from Disney’s The Jungle Book, but I always thought the panther was calling Baloo a “fore-fletcher” at the end of the movie. I just came across it again lately while reading comics. In Batman #16 from 1943, the Joker was referred to as a “four-flusher”. The little lightbulb blinked on above my head.

This explanation is years old, but I thought I would add: since Google indexes past issues of newspapers, you can now find interesting historical usage for lots of terms. For example, this letter from a 1909 Spokane newpaper is headlined “Flour Flusher Better Than Man Who Won’t Put Up Dukes”, but that appears to be a typo because the text of the article uses the term four-flusher, and in the manner described by Mr. Morris:

I just heard the term used in a 1947 movie where Eddie Braken won a poker hand, he only had 4 of the same suit but bluffed and won. Later someone said he could not be trusted because he was a four flusher.

Page 20 of “Four Lives In Paris” by Hugh Ford. Composer Igor Stravinsky at a Party in 1923 Paris refutes questions that he was impressed by the American Composer George Antheil. The reply delighted everybody. ” Ah, that’s just what we suspected, ” they chorused, “a four flushed.”

I first heard it in the tv show MASH, where Margret calls Frank a ‘two timing floor flusher’.

Off topic: A great movie for language, and slang lovers is ‘Fireball’ with Barbara Stanwick and Jimmy Cooper. Lots of 1930s/40s slang and humor when an professor tries to decipher the slang of popular culture of the time.